High culture is paranoid about sentiment, but human beings are intensely sentimental. And if art doesn't speak language that's acceptable to people, it relegates itself to obscurity.

Damn! What did Ansermet, that most faithful friend, know about Stravinsky's poverty of heart? What did he, that most devoted friend, know about Stravinsky's capacity to love? And where did he get his utter certainty that the heart is ethically superior to the brain? Are not vile acts committed as often with the heart's help as without it? Can't fanatics, with their bloody hands, boast of a high degree of affective activity? Will we ever be done with this imbecile sentimental Inquisition, the heart's Reign of Terror?

I drive around the streetsan inch away from weeping,ashamed of my sentimentality andpossible love.

I'm not sentimental--I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know,is that the sentimental person thinks things will last--the romanticperson has a desperate confidence that they won't.

There is no more subtle dissolvent of morals than sentimentality.

A sentimentalist is a man who sees an absurd value in everything and doesn't know the market price of any single thing.

I don't trust sentimentality in men; it goes with tyranny; you can't have one without the other.

Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.

I hope my tongue in prune juice smothers If I belittle dogs and mothers.

Sentimentality is only sentiment that rubs you up the wrong way.

To the modern spirit, disillusioned, or at least unillusioned, the great evil to be avoided is sentimentality.

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.

If there is anybody I detest, it is weak-minded sentimentalists-all those melancholy people who, out of an excess of sympathy for others, miss the thrill of their own essence and drift through life without identity, like a human fog, feeling sorry for everyone.